The smile froze on his face, and he stopped midsentence.
“I’m from the United States, the Columbia Basin Pack,” I added.
His nostrils flared.
“Just tell him,” I said impatiently. “I can’t explain things properly here.”
He put a hand on the counter and easily hopped over it. It was a move within the abilities of a young human man of physical prowess—which is what he looked to be.
“Come with me,” he said. The words were peremptory, but his tone and manner were not. He led me through a narrow archway into a room filled with tables and chairs set up for people who wanted to eat their treats or lunches inside, and most of the tables were full.
He waded gracefully between the tables, and I followed him to a door in the back of the room. It led out to a garden area. Like the yard where the mastiff had lived, it was the center of the block surrounded by buildings, but open to the air. There were tables here, too, but none of them was occupied.
“You aren’t a werewolf,” said my guide.
“My mate is,” I told him.
“If you would be so kind as to wait here,” the werewolf told me, “I will let Libor know you want to see him.”
“He’ll not have a choice,” I told him, and he stiffened. “Curiosity, at the very least, will bring him out. Tell him I’m the mate of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack and I’m on the run from the Lord of Night, who kidnapped me.”
“Bonarata?” exclaimed the werewolf, then he held up a hand when I started to explain further. “No need to talk to me. I’ll let Libor know. It might be a while.” He left.
A while was right. It soon became evident that if Libor wanted to see me, it wasn’t a priority. I waited on my feet for ten or fifteen minutes until one of the human waitstaff—and not one who spoke English—produced a tray with one of those baked-bread-wrapped sausages that had brought me here, three pastries that looked like a bagel filled with various fruit fillings, and a tall glass of lemonade.
The harried woman looked pointedly at her tray, then at the tables. I picked one with a comfortable-looking seat that backed up to one of the surrounding walls and sat so she could put the tray down. She smiled, then said something in a happy voice before whisking herself out of the garden and back into the bakery.
I was left alone to eat in the late-afternoon sun. Even though I’d just eaten a fairly large meal, I had no trouble eating a second one. I finished both food and drink and set the tray aside.
The sun warmed my back and birds sang in trees and my eyelids, stupid things, decided that the warmth, the gentle sounds, and the smell of werewolves meant that it was safe to sleep. I stood up and walked the little area, trying to stay awake.
I hadn’t gotten any sleep last night.
I knew, without acknowledging it, that when I started to talk to dead things, other ghosts seemed to sense it. A few months ago, after a rather violent encounter with a ghost, I’d spent days with ghosts following me.
Ghosts are mostly bits and pieces of people, of emotions, left behind—so it was like being followed by zombies. They want me to do something for them, but there isn’t enough of them left to communicate exactly what that is.
Mostly, when I did find out what they needed, it wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t fix the life they lived, the people they failed. I couldn’t give them their life back.
Anyway, I didn’t know exactly what the golem had been, except that it was complicated. But he had evidently powered up my ghost-attraction circuit to stun. Judging from the results, my meeting with the golem had lit me up like a target for any ghost in the area. The lingering effects made certain that my safe little corner next to the river had been invaded all night by ghosts. A city as old as Prague collects a lot of ghosts along the way. The worst of them had been a drowning victim.
I’d done my best to ignore it; however, it was true that drowned ghosts smell like the body of water they drown in. The Vltava smelled like any other river from the top, but evidently having been occupied by humans for better than a millennium meant that the bottom was full of rotting things. And I’d learned something new last night, too. Apparently some drowned ghosts were just like the stories—they could drip real water. Being dripped on by a foul-smelling ghost all night had not been conducive to sleep.
Though there’d been a few ghosts as I’d followed the werewolf through the bakery, they hadn’t been drippy or smelly, just faded remembrances of people who’d once worked or lived in the buildings. They’d drifted past me and through the visitors. And whatever the golem had called up in me had faded enough that they had taken no notice of me at all. I’d returned the favor.
There were currently no ghosts in the little sunlit garden where I was. The sounds of the tourist-filled streets were muted. Whatever was going to happen to me, I wasn’t going to be attacked, robbed, or arrested in this little garden until the Alpha of Prague came to see me.
I sat back down at the table I’d claimed for my own. I put my head down and closed my eyes, letting the sweet scents of fruit filling and sugar frosting linger in my senses as I fell asleep.
5
Adam
While I traveled by bus, Adam made do with a luxurious private jet. That is kind of how my life goes.
“YOU CONTACTED HER?” ASKED ELIZAVETA IN RUSSIAN as she put Mercy’s repaired necklace into Adam’s hand.
Elizaveta usually spoke to him in Russian, and mostly that was fine. Adam’s mother had spoken Russian in their home throughout his childhood, leaving him almost as fluent in it as he was in English.